“It was contempt.”

I want to note what he led with, standing on that porch, because it told me everything.

He did not lead with our son — did not ask how the baby was, whether he was eating, whether he had a name yet in my mouth even if not in his.

He did not lead with what he had done to me.

He led with the report. I read it five times. As though the crisis had been an epistemological one, a question of evidence, now happily resolved by a document.

As though what had gone wrong was that he had lacked sufficient data, and now that the data had arrived, we could all move forward.